Fantasy author goes ‘Bone’ deep

Samantha Shannon talks about debut bestseller

Samantha Shannon’s “The Bone Season” was one of the publishing sensations of 2013, picked as “must reads” by the likes of USA Today and Entertainment Weekly and landing on the New York Times bestseller list.

Just out in paperback, the novel is the first in a planned seven-part series and features Paige Mahoney, a clairvoyant who works for a crime boss in London, circa 2059, breaking into other people’s minds to learn their secrets.

Shannon will be at Mysterious Galaxy on Wednesday at 7 p.m. She answered questions by email from West London, where she lives.

Q: I understand you wrote “Bone Season” while you were in college and that your parents didn’t know you were working on it. Why not?

A: When I wrote as a teenager I was quite public about it. All my friends at school knew I was writing, as did my parents. I wanted “The Bone Season” to be more private, more personal. Something I worked on without anyone’s knowledge. I also knew that my parents would worry that I was focusing on writing rather than my degree — I’d often rushed my schoolwork to write in the past — so I kept it to myself until I knew it would be published.

Q: How did you go from studying film and Emily Dickinson to writing a dystopian novel about London’s criminal underworld in 2059? Is there a connection?

A: Emily Dickinson was, and is, a big influence on my work. I’ve never really connected with poetry, but I can open my collection of Dickinson poems at any random page and find something I love, whether it’s a message or a particular phrase.

She and John Donne both helped me design the spirit world in “The Bone Season.” They both had such fascinating outlooks on death and mortality. Film also links into that. At university I studied the way Dickinson connected with 19th Century photographic techniques, and that interest in “capturing” a subject, but never quite capturing its life and movement, will carry through to later books in the Bone Season series.

Q: Your book was an instant sensation. What was the most rewarding part of all the buzz it got?

A: Meeting readers from all different countries who enjoyed the book. It’s such a privilege to have had the book translated, and to be able to speak across continents.

A: Learning to manage the two sides of being a writer. On the one hand, you have the writing part: sitting alone in a silent office, hunched over a computer, gulping coffee, agonizing over every word. On the other, you have the promotion, which is much more public. I really enjoy both sides, but it’s a balancing act.

Q: In what ways did all that attention affect your writing of the second book? Feel some extra pressure this time?

A: Definitely. When you’re writing Book 2, you have the added pressure of not wanting to disappoint people who enjoyed the first book. “The Mime Order” is quite different from “The Bone Season.”